


Heartlines

by Muccamukk



Category: Life (TV)
Genre: Drabble Sequence, Extra Treat, Gen, Prison, Self-Harm, Tattoos, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-08 17:29:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15248289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: Come on, how would someone like you get tattoos?





	Heartlines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kunstvogel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kunstvogel/gifts).



Charlie had been in for six years, and they'd come for him every day: each time a new cruelty, always out of control. He leaned that this wasn't a nightmare, and that no angel would swing down and carry him away. The rest of his life would be hurt.

So he worked out the places where it hurt most, and asked a man carve the spiderweb that had ensnared Charlie from the small of his back over his hip and down his thigh.

He'd meant for this pain to free him, but it felt the same as all the rest.

* * *

By the time one swung down, Charlie no longer believed in angels. He denied Connie three times, and she got him put back into GP anyway.

Even sharing a blessed double cell with a calming, broken ex-stockbroker, Charlie still didn't always believe. He would wake up and lie utterly still, listening for the clangs and wails of SHU, worrying that he'd gone deaf. His old cell lurked on the backs of his eyelids, waiting.

Charlie asked for the star on the inside of his left wrist; he wanted it under where his watch band would sit when he got out.

* * *

Charlie spent two years trying to remake himself and kept finding Pelican Bay in his heart. He would wake from another dream where he'd never left his cell, and press his thumb to the inside of his wrist. It wasn't enough, not anymore.

He found Oliver Sanderson, confessed to killing Roman, and asked to be redrawn.

Charlie lay naked under the buzzing pens and let lines of pain transform the spiderweb into canyons and crevices. A pathway twisted up his thigh and over his hip, and on top of the mesa, on the small of his back, crouched a coyote.


End file.
